Speech segmentation with a neural encoder model of working memory

Micha Elsner, Cory Shain


Abstract
We present the first unsupervised LSTM speech segmenter as a cognitive model of the acquisition of words from unsegmented input. Cognitive biases toward phonological and syntactic predictability in speech are rooted in the limitations of human memory (Baddeley et al., 1998); compressed representations are easier to acquire and retain in memory. To model the biases introduced by these memory limitations, our system uses an LSTM-based encoder-decoder with a small number of hidden units, then searches for a segmentation that minimizes autoencoding loss. Linguistically meaningful segments (e.g. words) should share regular patterns of features that facilitate decoder performance in comparison to random segmentations, and we show that our learner discovers these patterns when trained on either phoneme sequences or raw acoustics. To our knowledge, ours is the first fully unsupervised system to be able to segment both symbolic and acoustic representations of speech.
Anthology ID:
D17-1112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1070–1080
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1112
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1112
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Micha Elsner and Cory Shain. 2017. Speech segmentation with a neural encoder model of working memory. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1070–1080, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Speech segmentation with a neural encoder model of working memory (Elsner & Shain, EMNLP 2017)
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